The routines
Choosing which procurement portals to watch
Work out which tender portals your firm actually needs by mapping market segments to publication tiers, then testing each portal on one quarter of its real output.
In short
- Start from a written market definition (what you sell, who buys it, which countries, what contract value band). Do not start from a list of portals.
- Above-threshold EU contracts must be published on TED. From 1 January 2026 that means €140,000 for central government supplies and services, €216,000 for sub-central bodies and €5,404,000 for works. Below those values publication moves to national and regional systems.
- The UK duty to publish a below-threshold tender notice starts at £12,000 including VAT for central government and £30,000 for other English authorities.
- Test a portal before adding it: read one closed quarter of its output filtered to your segment, mark every notice bid or no bid, and commit on the count.
- The cost of watching too many portals is attention, not fees. Review the map yearly, and on entering a new country or sector.
The portals you need are the ones that publish contracts you would actually bid for, at the size you bid at, in the countries you sell in. Work that out on paper before you subscribe to anything, because the two common alternatives both fail quietly: watch one portal and you see a slice of your market, subscribe to everything and you read none of it.
Write the market definition first
Before naming a single portal, write four things down for each part of your business.
What you sell, expressed the way a buyer would describe the problem rather than the way your website describes your product. Who buys it, meaning the type of body: central government, a local authority, a hospital trust, a water company, a development bank. Where, by country and where relevant by region. And the contract value band you can actually deliver, which decides more of your portal list than anything else.
Most firms have two to five distinct segments. A building services contractor in the Nordics might have one for framework places with municipalities at €50,000 to €400,000, and a second for design and build packages with national agencies above €5 million. Those are published in different places under different rules, and treating them as one market is how coverage holes start.
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The five publication tiers, and what falls through
Public contracts surface in one of five kinds of venue.
Where a public contract gets published, by tier
Tier one is the aggregator. Every EU and EEA contract above the directive thresholds must appear in the Supplement to the Official Journal, which is why TED carries the above-threshold layer of the whole single market. According to TED, EU public authorities publish contracts worth about €815 billion a year there, over 3,000 notices per working day in 24 languages. The US equivalent is the Governmentwide Point of Entry: SAM.gov is where federal contracting officers post synopses, and under FAR Part 5 a proposed contract action expected to exceed $25,000 must be synopsised there.
Tier two is the national portal, where most of your list will sit if you sell below the EU thresholds. The Netherlands is the clean case: TenderNed is the mandatory publication point for Dutch contracting authorities, and buyers may put below-threshold work there too. Spain works the same way, with PLACSP as the compulsory platform under Law 9/2017. The UK moved to a single central digital platform on 24 February 2025, so Find a Tender carries notices published under the Procurement Act 2023. Germany splits the job: oeffentlichevergabe.de aggregates federal, Länder and municipal notices, but the documents and the submission usually sit on platforms like DTVP.
Tier three is regional and municipal. The United States has no federal portal for state and local work, so a firm selling to counties and school districts needs state and municipal procurement systems and gets nothing from SAM.gov. Tiers four and five follow.
What falls through every tier deserves naming. Direct awards leave a trace only in an award notice, if at all. Calls inside a framework agreement or dynamic purchasing system go only to suppliers already on it. Subcontract packages under a prime are never publicly tendered. Those are the systematic sources of work you never see.
Why thresholds decide most of your list
Thresholds turn a vague coverage question into an arithmetic one. Find the threshold for your buyer type in your country, compare it to your contract value band, and the tier follows.
In the EU, Commission delegated regulations published in October 2025 set the values that apply from 1 January 2026 to the end of 2027. The official Commission threshold table gives €140,000 for supplies and services bought by central government, €216,000 for sub-central contracting authorities, €5,404,000 for works, and €750,000 for the social and other specific services in Annex XIV of Directive 2014/24/EU. Those figures fell slightly from the 2024 to 2025 set, and utilities and concession values sit in the same table.
The UK sets its own figures to match the WTO Government Procurement Agreement. From 1 January 2026, PPN 023 puts central government supplies and services at £135,018, sub-central at £207,720 and works at £5,193,000. Below those, the Procurement Act 2023 still requires a below-threshold tender notice on the central digital platform once the estimated value reaches £12,000 for English central government authorities and £30,000 for other English contracting authorities.
Watch out
UK thresholds under the Procurement Act 2023 are inclusive of VAT, while EU thresholds are net of it and French and Finnish national thresholds are quoted excluding tax. At 20% VAT that difference is wide enough to move a contract across a tier boundary, so never compare the two figures directly.
National sub-thresholds are the part generalists skip, and they are why a portal that looked empty is busy. France requires publication in BOAMP or a journal of legal notices once a contract reaches €90,000 excluding tax. Finland requires publication on Hilma above national thresholds of €60,000 for goods and services and €150,000 for works. Norway requires publication on Doffin above a national threshold of NOK 1.3 million.
So if your median contract in France is €80,000, TED shows you almost nothing and BOAMP shows you your market. Write the median value of your last twenty contracts next to each segment and the tier answers itself.
In the US the monitoring number is the $25,000 SAM.gov synopsis duty. A proposed rule of 23 June 2026 under the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul would lift it to $45,000, though it remains a proposal.
The sector venues generalists forget
Utilities are governed by Directive 2014/25/EU, which covers entities active in water, energy, transport and postal services. Their thresholds are much higher: from 1 January 2026, €432,000 for supplies and services, €5,404,000 for works, and €1,000,000 for the social and other services in Annex XVII. A utility can therefore run a €400,000 procurement with no EU-level notice at all. Many are private companies operating under special or exclusive rights, so they never appear in a search for government buyers.
Defence and security procurement runs under Directive 2009/81/EC, with thresholds of €432,000 for supplies and services and €5,404,000 for works. National security exemptions apply more often here than anywhere else, and several countries run a separate defence supplier portal alongside the general one. Give defence its own row rather than assuming the national portal covers it.
Some universities, housing associations and hospital groups publish only on their own supplier portal. Find those by reading award notices and noticing which buyers you never see a live notice from.
International and development bank work, and who it suits
Contracts financed by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the EBRD are published on each institution's own procurement pages, and UN agency requirements go through the UN Global Marketplace. There is no single aggregator any more: UN Development Business, which had carried notices from multilateral banks and aid agencies for over 46 years, phased down and stopped publishing on 31 March 2025, leaving each bank's own procurement channel.
It suits firms with reference projects a bank's evaluation will recognise and the working capital to carry mobilisation costs abroad through cycles measured in quarters rather than weeks. Without those, this row is the first one to cut.
How to test a portal before you commit
Do not add a portal because it sounds relevant. Add it because you counted.
Take one calendar quarter that has already closed and search the portal for it, filtered tightly to one segment: your codes, your country, your buyer type and your value band. If the result runs past 200 notices, tighten the filter rather than sampling at random.
Read every notice and mark it one of three ways. Would have bid. Would have looked and declined. Not our market at all. Twenty seconds per notice is realistic, so 200 notices is about 65 minutes of work.
The first bucket decides it. Divide your annual bid target by four and compare. A portal that would have produced a meaningful share of that quarter's bids is a monitoring commitment. One that would have produced zero or one is a bookmark you check twice a year. If the third bucket dominates, your filter is wrong rather than the portal, so fix it and re-run before rejecting the source.
The coverage map worksheet
One row per segment. Fill the venue column from research, the last two from the test.
| Segment (what, who, where, value band) | Publishing venue | Tier | Monitoring method | Last tested | Would-have-bid count |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Building services, municipalities, Denmark, €50k to €400k | National portal | 2 | Saved search, daily alert | 2026-07-01 | 9 |
| Design and build, national agencies, Nordics, above €5m | TED | 1 | Saved search, daily alert | 2026-07-01 | 2 |
Name a person against each row, because an unowned row is an unwatched row. Keep the rejected rows too, with a note saying why, so next year's review starts from a decision.
What watching too many portals actually costs
The subscription is rarely the problem. Attention is.
A monitoring routine survives on the reader trusting that most of what arrives is worth opening. Once the share of irrelevant notices passes roughly half, people skim subject lines and then stop opening them at all. Nothing visibly breaks: alerts keep arriving, nobody reads them, and the first symptom is a competitor's win announcement for a contract you cannot remember seeing.
Treat every added portal as a reading obligation with an owner and a time cost. Two routines keep this honest: a quarterly pass over your saved searches and alert rules, which fixes precision, and a coverage audit against last quarter's award notices, which fixes recall.
When to revisit the decision
Review the whole map once a year at a fixed point you will not skip. EU thresholds reset every two years, so the natural anchor in Europe is the January when new values take effect, and the current set runs to the end of 2027.
Between reviews, four events should trigger a look at one or two rows. Entering a new country, which almost always means a new tier two portal. Entering a new sector, particularly if the buyers are utilities or defence bodies under different directives. A coverage audit that traces a miss to a portal you were not watching. And a shift in your own contract size band: win a framework place that lifts your typical job from €80,000 to €600,000 and half your rows may have moved up a tier.
Portals also migrate and close, unpredictably: Find a Tender changed role in February 2025 and UN Development Business stopped publishing a month later.
Common questions
Is TED enough if I only sell in the EU?
Only if every contract you want is above the EU thresholds. TED carries above-threshold notices, which from 1 January 2026 means €140,000 and up for central government supplies and services, €216,000 for sub-central buyers and €5,404,000 for works. Anything below is published on national or regional portals, so a firm whose typical contract is €100,000 sees very little of its market on TED alone.
How many portals should a small firm watch?
There is no correct number, but it should match the count of market segments you wrote down, not the number of countries you would like to sell into. Most small firms end up with two to five active sources plus a couple of bookmarks they check quarterly. A list longer than your segment list means you added something without testing it.
Do I still need a national portal if the country also publishes to TED?
Usually yes, for two reasons. National portals carry the below-threshold work that never reaches TED, and they normally hold the tender documents and the submission mechanism, whereas the TED notice is a pointer. Most bidders spot the opportunity on whichever system they monitor, then bid on the national platform.
What is the fastest way to find the right portal for a country I have never sold into?
Take one recent contract award in your sector in that country and trace it back to where the notice was originally published. The venue is normally named on the award notice or in the national contracts register. That takes about twenty minutes and beats searching for the country name plus the word tenders, which returns resellers first.